Stephen McAdams - Böcker

The realm of auditory cognition is beginning to affirm itself as a new research orientation. Until now, no volume has existed that covers in a didactic fashion the whole range of subjects in this domain. To rectify this situation a special tutorial workshop organized by the French Acoustical Society was held at IRCAM, the music research institute founded by Pierre Boulez. Specialists in perceptual organization, memory, attention, music psychology, neurospsychology, and developmental psychology were invited from Europe and North America. The chapters of this book present the materials from their lectures. The book will be useful to advanced students in the cognitive sciences and scientists specializing in many fields as well as in auditory psychology.

Perception and Cognition of Music: The Sorbonne Lectures presents revised and updated materials delivered in four distinguished lectures at the Université Paris-Sorbonne and the Université de Montréal, originally published in French.The book bridges the fields of music psychology, music theory, and music analysis by way of a consideration of several aspects of music listening through the lens of cognitive psychology. Auditory grouping processes play a role in organizing the continuous incoming sensory information into events, streams of events, and segments of streams that form musical units. Perceived properties of events and streams depend on how the incoming information is organized. Special attention is given to timbre as an understudied musical parameter, which can be a strong structuring force and form-bearing element in music through orchestration practice. The development of systems of abstract knowledge built on different musical parameters within a given culture focuses on the cognitive processing of pitch systems and structures and their role in the mental representation of hierarchical event structures in listeners' minds. Finally, given that music is a temporal art par excellence, the temporality of music listening is explored through a collaborative project involving a composer, psychologists, and musicologists around the conception and creation of a musical work and the perception and affective response it engenders in a live-concert experiment. Each chapter concludes with elements for reflection to expand the necessary transdisciplinary approach that music scholarship needs.

The result of extensive collaboration among leaders of the worldwide auditory research community, Auditory Signal Processing: Physiology, Psychoacoustics, and Models is a record of the papers presented at the XIIIth International Symposium on Hearing (ISH) Dourdan, France, August 24-29, 2003. The volume includes a total of 62 invited papers, organized into 12 broad thematic areas: cochlear signal processing; brainstem signal processing; pitch; frequency modulation; streaming; amplitude modulation; responses to complex sounds; speech; comodulation masking release; binaural hearing; temporal coding; and plasticity.

The result of extensive collaboration among leaders of the worldwide auditory research community, Auditory Signal Processing: Physiology, Psychoacoustics, and Models is a record of the papers presented at the XIIIth International Symposium on Hearing (ISH) Dourdan, France, August 24-29, 2003. The volume includes a total of 62 invited papers, organized into 12 broad thematic areas: cochlear signal processing; brainstem signal processing; pitch; frequency modulation; streaming; amplitude modulation; responses to complex sounds; speech; comodulation masking release; binaural hearing; temporal coding; and plasticity.

Roughly defined as any property other than pitch, duration, and loudness that allows two sounds to be distinguished, timbre is a foundational aspect of hearing. The remarkable ability of humans to recognize sound sources and events (e.g., glass breaking, a friend’s voice, a tone from a piano) stems primarily from a capacity to perceive and process differences in the timbre of sounds. Timbre raises many important issues in psychology and the cognitive sciences, musical acoustics, speech processing, medical engineering, and artificial intelligence. Current research on timbre perception unfolds along three main fronts: On the one hand, researchers explore the principal perceptual processes that orchestrate timbre processing, such as the structure of its perceptual representation, sound categorization and recognition, memory for timbre, and its ability to elicit rich semantic associations, as well as the underlying neural mechanisms. On the other hand, timbre is studied as part of specificscenarios, including the perception of the human voice, as a structuring force in music, as perceived with cochlear implants, and through its role in affecting sound quality and sound design. Finally, computational acoustic models are sought through prediction of psychophysical data, physiologically inspired representations, and audio analysis-synthesis techniques. Along these three scientific fronts, significant breakthroughs have been achieved during the last decade. This volume will be the first book dedicated to a comprehensive and authoritative presentation of timbre perception and cognition research and the acoustic modeling of timbre. The volume will serve as a natural complement to the SHAR volumes on the basic auditory parameters of Pitch edited by Plack, Oxenham, Popper, and Fay, and Loudness by Florentine, Popper, and Fay. Moreover, through the integration of complementary scientific methods ranging from signal processing to brain imaging, the book has the potential to leverage new interdisciplinary synergies in hearing science. For these reasons, the volume will be exceptionally valuable to various subfields of hearing science, including cognitive auditory neuroscience, psychoacoustics, music perception and cognition, but may even exert significant influence on fields such as musical acoustics, music information retrieval, and acoustic signal processing.It is expected that the volume will have broad appeal to psychologists, neuroscientists, and acousticians involved in research on auditory perception and cognition.  Specifically, this book will have a strong impact on hearing researchers with interest in timbre and will serve as the key publication and up-to-date reference on timbre for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, as well as established scholars.